Elizabeth is going into the ground
Four trees in the north Maine woods communicate through an underground network of roots and fungi. Four women, each struggling to come into her own in a nearby rural logging town, pass each other gifts by way of the town’s one-car postal service. By blurring the boundary between human and tree, Elizabeth is going into the ground contemplates the communities of our forests, weaving a tale of love, resilience, and old growth.
2023 Bay Area Playwrights Festival Finalist
2023 Princess Grace Playwriting Award Finalist
2023 O’Neill Semifinalist
2023 Playwrights Realm Scratchpad Semifinalist
2022 Honorable Mention Leah Ryan FEWW Prize
2022 Winner UT Austin Green Fund Award
Reading – Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival (2024)
Production – UT Austin Studio Performance (2023)
Reading – Scriptworks Austin (2022)
Pretend it’s Pretend
Playgrounds are designed to be dangerous enough for experimentation, yet safe enough to allow experiments to fail without serious injury. This play is a playground. When Arthur is asked to design a bulletproof playscape for his daughter’s old school, he confronts an unsettling reality: that the world does not operate by the same rules as playgrounds. At a time when dangers beyond the playground are overwhelmingly present, this is a story about the endurance of care. It is a play about learning, growing up, and grown-ups learning to play.
2024 O’Neill Semifinalist
2024 Kennedy Center’s Paula Vogel Prize Second Place (KCACTF)
Production – UTNT, UT Austin (2024)
Petrificationology
An immersive performance in the Texas Memorial Museum in Austin
Nestled between the disciplines of Geology (the study of rocks) and Biology (the study of the living) is the small and perpetually underfunded sub-field of Petrificationology: the study of those who have been turned to stone by the Gods. Sometimes petrification happens because the Gods are punishing that person for their sins. Sometimes the Gods are trying to save them from a worse fate. Sometimes – and this happens more often than we’d like to admit – petrification just happens. And we never learn why. Petrificationology is a study of stillness, of breath-taking, of the sudden and irreversible losses that occur unseen every day across the face of our planet.
Production – Cohen New Works Festival (2023)
Rumpus for the End of the World OR Susan Sontag in a Bear Suit OR Pan-
There’s a Gala in the city. (Not that one.) In the depths of creative corporate hell, three interns throw out months of preparation as they frantically pivot to please the Gala’s mysterious new host. On the other side of town, a prophetic rabbit competes for the title of World Champion Hopper, but he’s really more invested in letting everyone know that the world is about to end. A farcical satyr play about fast fashion, camp, and coming face-to-face with the fury of an exploited natural world.
2022 Clubbed Thumb Biennial Commission Semifinalist
Reading – Masters Salon Reading Series, UT Austin (2022)
The Norns of Athens, Maine
Pas, Prësin, and Futur have lived in the Olde Olde Tree in the Athens dump for as long as anyone here can remember. From there, they weave a knotted web of the lives and deaths of all who live in Athens. A story of being forsaken, of wearing out a welcome, of manifest destiny unraveling.
2023 Playwrights Center Venturous Play List
Workshop – NG Arts (2021)
TEN MINUTE PLAYS
The Courtship Ritual of Sandhill Cranes
Two docents at the Heart of Texas Natural History Museum contemplate what happens when you study your life instead of living it. A play in dioramas.
Emma Watkins 